American Uprising by Daniel Rasmussen

societies in the United States were self-reproducing, no such calculus existed in Louisiana. Sugar work was too grueling and demanding, the profits too large, and replacement slaves too easily available to worry much about natural reproduction. In 1800, one planter estimated that each plantation hand produced $285 per year, with the average hand priced at $900. Within four years, a slave had more than recouped the initial investment, rendering the need for natural reproduction less important. Planters relied first on the Atlantic slave trade and then on the internal slave trade to supply a steady stream of new workers.
    Amid these horrible conditions, no individual planter had the power to stop his slaves from revolting, not when they outnumbered him fifty to one. The planter relied on slave drivers, gang leaders, and bribed or coerced informants to maintain a militaristic choke hold on the people who labored for them in these plantations. Those who complied did not go unrewarded. Charles would have been compensated for his good work and loyalty with a larger hut, nicer clothes, or gifts of money or extra food.
    Other than his role as a driver, most slaves knew only one thing about Charles: his relationship with a woman on the Trépagnier estate. Drivers like Charles were trusted to travel more freely than any other slaves, and Charles took advantage of his relative freedom to leave the plantation frequently, spending nights and weekends in a small cabin with a woman far from the Andry estate. Manuel Andry himself permitted these visits, and Trépagnier sanctioned them, perhaps in the hopes that Charles would impregnate this woman and she might bear a child as loyal and hardworking as his father. But no one really kept track of Charles’s conjugal visits. Few knew much about whom he really spent time with or whom he confided in. He kept a tight circle of confidantes, but other than that he was an unknowable. To most slaves, he was simply the half-white representative of the master. And to the master, he was the half-white liaison from the slave quarters. He was the central link, the connector, and the enabler of the complex machinery of the Andry slave plantation—or so it seemed.

Chapter Seven
The Rebels’ Pact
    A s Charles walked the few miles from the Andry plantation to the Trépagnier estate to see his woman, he passed by the plantation of James Brown. Here he must have stopped to talk with Kook and Quamana before continuing on. Perhaps as he went to New Orleans on his master’s business, he would linger beneath the shade of the cypress trees that lined the fields and speak with other slaves from other plantations.
    Romance provided the perfect cover. While it was not a formal marriage, Charles had taken up with a slave on the Trépagnier plantation, whom he visited whenever he could. He did not marry this woman—whose name is lost to history—perhaps because he was not allowed to, or perhaps because he understood how unrealistic marriage was in a society where a master could rape or sell one’s spouse at his own convenience. Slave women had little control over their reproductive and sexual lives, and they were the constant victims of rape and sexual violence by every white male, from the master and his sons to neighboring planters and itinerant laborers. Relationships between slaves were vulnerable to the sexual whims of the master class, and recognizing this, men like Charles often chose to simply take up with a woman rather than cement a relationship with easily broken marriage bonds. Charles’s relationship with this woman was no doubt constrained by the tragic realities of master-slave power relationships.
    As to his light skin, most everyone knew the source of that: he was the son of a white planter—a white planter who had slept with and impregnated Charles’s slave mother. Such relationships were not uncommon. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips famously condemned the antebellum South as “one great